This week's popular Artificial Intelligence news: September 8, 2016

The technology press is abuzz these days with stories about Machine Learning (ML) and Artificial Intelligence (AI) -- every other week it seems we're hearing about a new AI surpassing human ability at some task or other, and just as often we hear about exciting new start-ups revolutionizing traditional problem spaces using machine learning. We also see the odd notable AI failure every now and then. Artificial intelligence technology doesn't just have to solve grand challenges. Sometimes, it can tackle decidedly everyday problems -- like, say, improving a cucumber farm. Makoto Koike has built a cucumber sorter that uses Google's TensorFlow machine learning technology to save his farmer parents a lot of work.